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As Adam Smith knew, the experts think they know best, but what do the people say?

The high-powered experts who make up the LSE’s growth commission have proposed a blueprint for reviving Britain. To achieve its goals, though, we’ll have to get rid of those blasted MPs and councillors. What say we?

What makes economies grow? You could say it is the oldest question in economics: the complete title of Adam Smith’s foundational work is An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

It took Smith nearly a thousand pages to set out his formula. This past week, an independent “growth commission” convened by the London School of Economics provided a modern answer – albeit for the UK only – in a mere 36 pages.

Not that the LSE’s commission’s report ever risked being superficial. Its authors include a Nobel Prizewinner, a former chief economist of the World Bank and the first woman to become a deputy governor of the Bank of England. And its attempt to prescribe “the institutions and policies that should underpin growth for the next 50 years” is timely. For the past four years, the policy debate in the UK has been dominated by the question of how to escape from the slump induced by the financial crisis, yet few would deny that the UK needs a long-term economic strategy as well as short-term tactics.

So what is the commission’s answer to the question of what Britain needs to do to reinvigorate its economy in the 21st century? It identifies three critical determinants of prosperity in which the UK is deficient and which policy should therefore cultivate: skills, infrastructure and innovation.

On one level this sounds like a statement of the bleeding obvious. Can you win a Nobel Prize for working out that it would be a good thing if the workforce was better educated, railways and roads got an upgrade, and if private companies spent more on research and development? Where do I apply?

But we should cut the report’s authors a bit of slack. Yes, it is unfortunate that economists’ theories of growth are formulated at such an Olympian level of abstraction that by themselves they generate only the most platitudinous of conclusions. For this very reason, however, the test of a body such as the LSE commission is whether it is brave enough to advocate more specific policies – and on this score, it does not disappoint. The constraints it has identified may not come as much of a surprise; but the solutions it proposes are more controversial.

In secondary education, the authors endorse the academy model of more autonomy and greater centralisation of funding and accountability for schools. They advocate the creation of a National Infrastructure Bank. On innovation, they back proposals for an allowance for corporate equity that would remove the existing tax incentives to finance businesses with debt, and thereby encourage risky start-ups for which equity funding is the only realistic option. These are serious policy proposals, backed by detailed argument; they deserve a serious hearing from the government.

Unfortunately, the commission makes a further, overarching recommendation – one that is not just controversial, but positively dangerous. How, it asks, did Britain get into this mess in the first place? Why did it lose its historical lead in skills, infrastructure and innovation? The ultimate answer, it says, is simple: the root of our problems is politics.

The trouble with Britain is that it allows elected politicians to make policy. Worse still, we allow local politicians a say in things such as planning and schools. And, to cap it all, we have an unfortunate habit of changing our minds and electing different parties every few years. The result is a chronically unstable environment for long-term investment. Public priorities never stay the same for long enough to get anything done, and the private sector is at the mercy of Nimbys and the political cycle.

So, if we want to make Britain grow again, we need not only to make the right policy choices, but to take those choices out of the hands of politicians. We need a “new insti­tutional architecture” that can “put politics in the right place”. Only then will we bid farewell to interminable “flip-flopping”, the inevitable harvest of “political bickering”. Economic policy will at last be in the capable hands of independent experts: an infrastructure planning commission to decide, say, where nuclear power stations should be built, and a national growth council to dispense an industrial strategy.

It is a seductive view of what constitutes economic progress – one that has bewitched well-meaning technocrats down the ages, from enlightened imperialists such as John Stuart Mill, who argued for a “government of leading-strings” for Britain’s colonial possessions, to the socialist planners charged with the instant industrialisation of the eastern bloc’s developmental nation states. If only the benighted people and their annoying representatives would get out of the way, the impartial experts could get on with modernising the country.

The reality is that policies made by unaccountable experts are unsustainable – because they do not reflect what the people want. Only a democratic process, however flawed, can do that.

The LSE commission’s report was published in the same week as it was announced that it will take 20 years to complete the High Speed 2 rail link, in large part because of the need to follow time-consuming planning procedures. Such is the price of a democratic economy. No doubt unelected bureaucrats handing down compulsory purchase orders could do the job in half the time. But policy would no longer be reflecting people’s interests; it would be reflecting what the experts say their interests are.

It is a critical distinction – and, as it happens, one of which Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations remains the original exposition.

Felix Martin is a macroeconomist and bond investor. His book, “Money: the Unauthorised Biography”, will be published by the Bodley Head in June

MP Michelle Thomson's full speech on rape at 14: "I am a survivor"

On Thursday, the independent MP for Edinburgh West Michelle Thomson used a debate marking the UN’s International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women to describe her own experience of rape. Thomson, 51, said she wanted to break the taboo among her generation about speaking about the subject.

MPs listening were visibly moved by the speech, and afterwards Thomson tweeted she was "overwhelmed" by the response.

Here is her speech in full:

I am going to relay an event that happened to me many years ago. I want to give a very personal perspective to help people, both in this place and outside, understand one element of sexual violence against women.

When I was 14, I was raped. As is common, it was by somebody who was known to me. He had offered to walk me home from a youth event. In those days, everybody walked everywhere - it was quite common. It was early evening. It was not dark. I was wearing— I am imagining and guessing—jeans and a sweatshirt. I knew my way around where I lived - I was very comfortable - and we went a slightly differently way, but I did not think anything of it. He told me that he wanted to show me something in a wooded area. At that point, I must admit that I was alarmed. I did have a warning bell, but I overrode that warning bell because I knew him and, therefore, there was a level of trust in place. To be honest, looking back at that point, I do not think I knew what rape was. It was not something that was talked about. My mother never talked to me about it, and I did not hear other girls or women talking about it.

It was mercifully quick and I remember first of all feeling surprise, then fear, then horror as I realised that I quite simply could not escape, because obviously he was stronger than me. There was no sense, even initially, of any sexual desire from him, which, looking back again, I suppose I find odd. My senses were absolutely numbed, and thinking about it now, 37 years later, I cannot remember hearing anything when I replay it in my mind. As a former professional musician who is very auditory, I find that quite telling. I now understand that your subconscious brain—not your conscious brain—decides on your behalf how you should respond: whether you take flight, whether you fight or whether you freeze. And I froze, I must be honest.

Afterwards I walked home alone. I was crying, I was cold and I was shivering. I now realise, of course, that that was the shock response. I did not tell my mother. I did not tell my father. I did not tell my friends. And I did not tell the police. I bottled it all up inside me. I hoped briefly—and appallingly—that I might be pregnant so that that would force a situation to help me control it. Of course, without support, the capacity and resources that I had within me to process it were very limited.

I was very ashamed. I was ashamed that I had “allowed this to happen to me”. I had a whole range of internal conversations: “I should have known. Why did I go that way? Why did I walk home with him? Why didn’t I understand the danger? I deserved it because I was too this, too that.” I felt that I was spoiled and impure, and I really felt revulsion towards myself.

Of course, I detached from the child that I had been up until then. Although in reality, at the age of 14, that was probably the start of my sexual awakening, at that time, remembering back, sex was “something that men did to women”, and perhaps this incident reinforced that early belief.​
I briefly sought favour elsewhere and I now understand that even a brief period of hypersexuality is about trying to make sense of an incident and reframing the most intimate of acts. My oldest friends, with whom I am still friends, must have sensed a change in me, but because I never told them they did not know of the cause. I allowed myself to drift away from them for quite a few years. Indeed, I found myself taking time off school and staying at home on my own, listening to music and reading and so on.

I did have a boyfriend in the later years of school and he was very supportive when I told him about it, but I could not make sense of my response - and it is my response that gives weight to the event. I carried that guilt, anger, fear, sadness and bitterness for years.

When I got married 12 years later, I felt that I had a duty tell my husband. I wanted him to understand why there was this swaddled kernel of extreme emotion at the very heart of me, which I knew he could sense. But for many years I simply could not say the words without crying—I could not say the words. It was only in my mid-40s that I took some steps to go and get help.

It had a huge effect on me and it fundamentally - and fatally - undermined my self-esteem, my confidence and my sense of self-worth. Despite this, I am blessed in my life: I have been happily married for 25 years. But if this was the effect of one small, albeit significant, event in my life stage, how must it be for those women who are carrying it on a day-by-day basis?

I thought carefully about whether I should speak about this today, and it was people’s intake of breath and the comment, “What? You’re going to talk about this?”, that motivated me to do it, because there is still a taboo about sharing this kind of information. Certainly for people of my generation, it is truly shocking to talk in public about this sort of thing.

As has been said, rape does not just affect the woman; it affects the family as well. Before my mother died early of cancer, I really wanted to tell her, but I could not bring myself to do it. I have a daughter and if something happened to her and she could not share it with me, I would be appalled. It was possibly cowardly, but it was an act of love that meant that I protected my mother.

As an adult, of course I now know that rape is not about sex at all - it is all about power and control, and it is a crime of violence. I still pick up on when the myths of rape are perpetuated form a male perspective: “Surely you could have fought him off. Did you scream loudly enough?” And the suggestion by some men that a woman is giving subtle hints or is making it up is outrageous. Those assumptions put the woman at the heart of cause, when she should be at the heart of effect. A rape happens when a man makes a decision to hurt someone he feels he can control. Rapes happen because of the rapist, not because of the victim.

We women in our society have to stand up for each other. We have to be courageous. We have to call things out and say where things are wrong. We have to support and nurture our sisters as we do with our sons. Like many women of my age, I have on occasion encountered other aggressive actions towards me, both in business and in politics. But one thing that I realise now is that I am not scared and he was. I am not scared. I am not a victim. I am a survivor.

Julia Rampen is the editor of The Staggers, The New Statesman's online rolling politics blog. She was previously deputy editor at Mirror Money Online and has worked as a financial journalist for several trade magazines.